Posts Tagged ‘Anti Israel’

The Rev. Bruce Shipman, an Episcopal chaplain at Yale University, resigned in the wake of his letter to The New York Times that blamed rising anti-Semitism in Europe on Israel.

The Episcopal Church at Yale issued a statement on Sept. 4 announcing that Shipman, “on his own initiative, had resigned as Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, effective immediately.”

The statement does not reference the letter to the Times, saying instead, “It is our belief that the dynamics between the Board of Governors and the Priest-in-Charge occasioned the resignation of the Rev. Shipman.”

“The Episcopal Church at Yale, its Board of Governors, the Bishops of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, and the Rev. Bruce Shipman are all committed to a civil dialogue on difficult issues that divide peoples of this world and pledge ourselves to the prayerful and humble work of reconciliation and peace in our hurting and divided world,” the statement concludes.

Shipman’s Aug. 25 letter to the Times was in response to an Aug. 20 Op-Ed by Deborah Lipstadt, an author and Jewish history professor at Emory University, detailing the rise in European anti-Semitic incidents.

His letter said the trend “parallels the carnage in Gaza over the last five years, not to mention the perpetually stalled peace talks and the continuing occupation of the West Bank.” It also said that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.”

Shipman later apologized to Yale students in a letter to the editor of the Yale Daily.

“Nothing done in Israel or Palestine justifies the disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Europe or elsewhere,” he wrote.

The Palestinian Authority “Pallywood” movie industry has come up with a spectacular comparison of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center with the Israeli Air Force’s bombing of a 12-story building housing a Hamas command center.

The Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) translated with English subtitle and published the 20-second video on Monday with the words “Same Terror” emblazoned on the screen as the building in New York and Gaza, followed by billowing smoke

The production is a brilliant piece of propaganda and is convincing to the Palestinian Authority population that knows only what the PA media feeds it.

The video comparison would make anyone who does not know anything about 9/11 that the two bombings really are the “same terror.”

Thirteen years of media messages, that the 9/11 never happened or that the Jews engineered it, have educated a new generation of Arabs to hate Israel and Jews, unlike the fragile co-existence that nurtured Israeli-Arab relations in Judea, Gaza and Samaria from the Six-Day War until the late 1980s, when, Yasser Arafat popularized terror.

The video, of course, does not mention that the IDF warned civilians in the building in the Gaza to evacuate and that no was killed. Approximately two dozen people were wounded. The film also did not tell viewers that nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Al Qaeda aerial attacks.

This is the atmosphere in which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wants to re-start peace talks, which presumably involve a Palestinian Authority that is composed of Hamas and the rival Fatah faction, headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

British police have arrested a 39-year-old man, (not Jewish, we’re not sure if that surprises us or not) for assault anti-Israel and anti-Semitic Member of Parliament George Galloway, who was hospitalized for broken ribs and a head injury.

The attacker was identified as Neil Masterson.

Galloway has been released from the hospital, but it is doubtful that the attacker was able to beat some sense into his head.

The MP, who has built his political career on loving Saddam Hussein and Hamas and hating Jews and Israel, was posing for pictures in west London Friday night when the attacker jumped on him while calling him “Hitler.”

The assault “appears to be connected with his comments about Israel because the guy was shouting about the Holocaust,” said Galloway’s spokesman. The name of his one-MP party is Respect, which indicates his ignorance of the English language.

The party’s name is a very contrived acronym for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community and Trade Unionism. A more accurate acronym would be “Racist, Extremist, Satanic, Pisher, Ethnic=hatingt, Crude and Twisted.

Galloway has been under police investigation since his call earlier this month that the city of Bradford, which he represents, be an “Israel-free” zone that would bar Israeli tourist and place a total ban on anything related to Israel.

We wish Galloway a speedy recovery and hope that some of the medicine he needs is made in Israel.

The glimmer of the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State, or ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) may have already reached America’s shores, although U.S. citizens might not yet realize it. Dock workers at the port of Oakland have been afraid to brave the ire of Islamist protesters in California, and instead opted to stay off the job.

It appears that weeks-long planning by Palestinian Arab immigrants, their descendants and supporters who hate Israel and the Jews has paid off; the consolidated group of some 70 organizations has essentially seized control over the port in Oakland, California.

For the second day in a row, pro-Gaza protesters led by Palestinian Arab groups successfully blockaded the Piraeus, a ZIM Integrated Shipping Services vessel, at the Oakland port.

Demonstrators said they were protesting Israel’s counter terror operation in Gaza. But more than 300,000 Israelis are still internally displaced by Hamas terror.

Operation Protective Edge was launched to silence the incessant rocket, missile and mortar fire that has rained down on southern Israel for years.

Several hundred Oakland protesters gathered again in a picket line Sunday after the ZIM vessel docked at about 5:30 pm. That was some 24 hours after it was forced to circle in the Pacific Ocean to avoid a mob of thousands at the same port the previous day.

A few dozen police officers monitored the picket line, according to KTVU TV, which interviewed 26-year-old Mohamed Shehk, media and communications director of the Oakland-based ‘Critical Resistance’ group.

“As a Palestinian, I have always been a strong supporter for the Palestinian cause for liberation,” Shehk told the news outlet. He added that he also supports ‘various movements of liberation around the world.’

“We will not stand for the murdering of Gazans,” he said.

The ultimate goal of the blockade, said protesters, is to stop the company from unloading at the Port of Oakland altogether. They plan similar blockades against ZIM in Tacoma and Seattle, organizers said.

The ILWU dockworkers’ union chose to honor the picket line and refused to unload the vessel. It’s not the first time; a similar blockade against ZIM was backed by the union in 2010.

Oddly, Saturday’s massive anti-Israel rally was covered only by independent bloggers and the UK-based newspaper, The Guardian. And Sunday’s blockade was covered by KTUV and KPIX. It didn’t even raise a blip on the national scene.

On Saturday, activists gathered early at a nearby transit station, the paper reported, led by 21-year-old Palestinian Sameh Ayesh, a member of the San Francisco-based Arab Youth Organization.

One of those involved in organizing the demonstration, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) executive director Lara Kiswani, said her organization was currently discussing “how to escalate our tactics.”

The paper reported that as protesters reached the port entrance, a line of police officers was standing in formation. “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” the mob shouted, playing on the recent news coverage of police brutality against rioting protesters in the town of Ferguson, Missouri following an lethal incident of police brutality.

Speaking with The Guardian, Shehk tried hard to link the incident to Israel’s counter terror operation in Gaza. “On Twitter, we’ve seen people in Gaza tweet to protesters in Ferguson how to cope with teargas,” he said.

A measly crowd in London of 100 anti-Israeli rioters, most of them of Asian descent, protested outside a Tesco store that sells Israeli products while others barged inside and attacked nearly two dozen police officers Saturday.

“A group of Asian men holding Palestinian flags came walking in and starting to push products over and getting aggressive with staff and shoppers. Police officers tried to stop them but I ran out,” one shopper told the London Telegraph.

Only one person was arrested for assaulting a police officer.

The Birmingham, England’s store’s sin that drew the protest was its selling Israeli products. Rioters grabbed merchandise off the shelves and smashed them on the floor and yelled at shoppers and workers, many of who fled in fear.

Chanting demonstrators threw produce to the floor and shouted at staff and shoppers

A police statement described the protest outside the store as ”peaceful” but added that some protesters “began throwing stock inside Tesco store [and] two [were] escorted from [the] premises.” One person inside the store told the Daily Mail that the rioters “wreaked havoc.”

Tesco customers were not impressed by the riot and went on social media to castigate the behavior as Idiotic” and “disgusting,” among other adjectives.

“Peace protest? I think not. Disgusting!” one tweet stated. Another tweeter with the Arabic-sounding name, of Wagar Ahmed, wrote, “This isn’t helping the Palestinian cause. In fact, it’s doing the opposite.” Mehr Ali tweeted, “How is this going to help Gaza. Idiots.”

More to the point, how is this going to help Britain, where Islamic law already has been recognized in several areas.

Pro-Hamas Member of Parliament earlier this month called on a city to ban from the city anything and anyone connected with Israel.

British expatriates who have returned to their native country for a visit in the last several years have reported they are in shock of what is a rapidly growing de facto fanatic Muslim revolution.

Fear of confronting the fact of the crushing of British democratic values and morals has left Britons defenseless against.

Saturday’s protest ostensibly was against a store selling Israeli products but in a larger context was another riot against Western culture.

It’s getting harder and harder for even diehard apologists to make a case that the Obama administration supports Israel. The latest news comes after a very rocky period in which the administration tried to do an end-around to coerce Israel into a bad ceasefire deal with Hamas, while experimenting with an unseemly and embarrassing (and short-lived) flight ban to Israel’s international airport, and straightforwardly mouthing the false Hamas narrative about an Israeli attack in southern Gaza.

Now administration officials have disclosed, in a leak-blast full of astonishing quotes, that a shipment of arms to resupply Israel after the recent operation in Gaza was stopped when senior officials became aware of it.

But they aren’t just disclosing that the shipment was halted, and that other shipments will be getting a closer look. They are concocting an entire narrative about the Israelis “outflanking” the administration, running off on their own, and being unreceptive to U.S. influence.

Obama is transparent, if you read his oracular signs with the right key. Most responsible observers have been reluctant up to now to use that key. But there’s really nothing else left to do. We’re beyond the point at which the damaging implications of tailored “leaks” from the Obama administration can be explained away.

The most positive interpretation of the administration’s posture, as revealed in the incendiary WSJ article, is that it is ideologically committed to a radical-left view in which Israel figures as the villain. From this ideological motive, Obama hopes to use American influence to limit and confound Israeli policy. Think of the policy the typical flotilla activist would adopt toward Israel, and that’s the thematic pattern in Obama’s executive-branch campaign. The campaign can’t be waged too overtly, because of the inevitable blowback from Congress.

Tending the “BASE”

Characteristically, the latest escapade with the halted arms shipment is being disclosed in a way that will gratify Obama’s radical-left political base. Right away, the disclosure has the Obama signature on it (emphasis added):

White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval.

Is Obama ever not caught off guard? This opening sentence explains to his base that he and his top officials weren’t responsible for seeming to approve of the IDF’s operation in Gaza by providing supplies to it.

But the sentence also flat-out lies – by implying that there was something sneaky about Israel’s procurement of ammunition. In fact, Israel was reordering ammunition under Foreign Military Sales cases for which reordering is already authorized, without the need for renewed approval. This is not uncommon with foreign military sales (and is actually acknowledged later in the same article, as Jeff Dunetz points out). Depicting a reorder of ammo as “adroit bureaucratic maneuvering” is worse than tendentious, and can have only one purpose. The purpose is clarified here:

But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.

Certainly this can be read as the Obama administration distancing itself from Israel in a diplomatic and geopolitical sense. But don’t discount the reality of who Obama is as a politician. He’s equally invested in distancing himself, in the minds of his most loyal supporters, from whatever outcome Israel is able to secure from the current conflict. The narrative crafted by this very tailored “leak” is perfectly designed to appeal to those supporters, who at this point are virtually certain to be disappointed in Israel’s outcome.

A Facebook picture of a South African Jewish high school student wearing a traditional Palestinian scarf has triggered outrage and a petition calling for his removal from an honorary position, as well as a dueling petition in his defense.

Joshua Broomberg, deputy head boy of the King David Victory Park High School, a Jewish day school, and the captain of the South African national debate team, was tagged in a Facebook photograph wearing a traditional Palestinian scarf and a badge of the Palestinian flag, according to the Independent Online, a South African news website.

The caption of the photo stated: “Team South Africa wearing Palestinian badges and Keffiyehs to show our opposition to the human rights violations carried out against the people of Palestine.” Broomberg and the debate team were in Thailand competing in the World Schools Debating Championship.

In response to the posting, a petition was posted online at change.org calling for Broomberg’s removal as deputy head boy, an honorary student post. The petition quickly garnered 2,000 online signatures. In response, an opposing petition was also posted at change.org, opposing Broomberg’s removal. That petition has garnered more than 4,000 signatures.

Rabbi Craig Kacev, general director of the South African Board of Jewish Education, which oversees King David Victory Park, said that Broomberg would not be suspended and defended the student’s right to free speech, telling South Africa’s Eyewitness News, “We encourage critical thinking, we encourage our learners to debate and there’s no censorship in our school.”

In a post on Facebook, Broomberg apologized for creating an “uproar,” which he said he did not intend, but defended himself as a proud Jew and as a Zionist, and stated, “While I apologize for the hurt we seem to have caused, I do not apologize for standing with Palestine on this issue.”